"The committee that sponsors the prize praised 88-year-old Castro for peacefully resolving international conflicts. That's in stark contrast to the view in the West of Castro as a dictator who ran an oppressive one-party state for nearly five decades."

“Mr. Castro, during his leadership of Cuba, didn’t use force or violence when resolving conflicts and problems in international relations and Cuba’s ties with the U.S.,” said the Chinese state-run Global Times, citing a member of the Confucius prize jury. “This has important inspirational meaning with regard to the resolution of current international conflicts.”

The jury was also impressed with Mr. Castro’s “active” diplomacy in retirement and “important contributions” to nuclear disarmament, the Global Times said in a Thursday report. These qualities helped the 88-year-old stand out from a shortlist of 14 individuals and two organizations, including South Korean President Park Geun-hye, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and the Chinese Taoism Association.

But Mr. Castro, who formally stepped down in 2008 after nearly five decades in power, wasn’t in Beijing to lap up the honor. He was represented by a group of Cuban students, who left the “grand” award ceremony with a golden Confucius statue and prize certificate, the Global Times said.

A Parody.

Sim Pace, evoking precedent set when Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace prize last year, makes the case that Nationals' pitcher Stephen Strasburg should be inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame after his stellar debut performance. From the letters section of the Washington Post:

In his self-congratulatory Nobel Lecture, the former president proves he's still as naive as ever.

IN A NOBEL LECTURE YESTERDAY that is a familiar mixture of personal self-satisfaction and national self-abasement, Jimmy Carter names the greatest challenge in the world today, and it is us: the tragic failure of the wealthiest nations to cure the poverty of the poorest.

Implicitly, the second-greatest problem is also us: our failure to recognize that war is evil and to embrace "the premise that the United Nations is the best avenue for the maintenance of peace."

The Nobel committee is using Jimmy Carter to attack the current president of the United States. The former president should give back the Peace Prize.

SOMEONE TELL Jimmy Carter to give back the Nobel prize. Since the million-dollar Peace Prize was awarded to the former president as an expression of anti-American pique, Carter should politely decline.

Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said giving the award to Carter "should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken. . . .